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                           CHAPTER VI

                   The Human Origin of Morals

        Theories of Moral Law -- Evolution and Morals --
         Religion and Morals -- Moral Eccentricities --
                       The Christian Ethic

                      THEORIES OF MORAL LAW

     THERE are few subjects on which so much solemn nonsense has
been written as on the nature of conscience and moral law; and
there is no other phenomenon of the human mind of which it is
possible to give so simple and natural an explanation.

     There are few facts of human life which have been so deeply
woven into the web of religious thought as what are called a man's
moral and immoral actions; and there are none which have so little
real connection with religion.

     There is no other element of our decaying religions which has
been so reverently clothed by modern philosophers with a mantle of
mysticism; and there is none which evolutionary science explains
more clearly.

     There is nothing which so readily brings together our modern
oracles, inside and outside of the Churches, our preachers and
essayists and editorial writers, as zeal for the august and eternal
authority of moral sentiment; and there is nothing that has been
more persistently assailed and more caustically ridiculed by a
large number of the most brilliant literary men of our time.

     There is no institution of the past that so universally
commands the lip-homage of our skeptical and rebellious generation
as well as of believers; and there is nothing in human history
which has caused, and causes today, as much hypocrisy.

     Clearly, we need a discussion of the nature of morality. We
have seen what religion is, and how it evolved. We have examined
the fundamental doctrines of God and immortality. Let us now, in
the same plain and candid way, examine what seems to be the common
ground of all idealism, the moral sentiment.

     I begin, as usual, with facts. No one will question the
universal, never-ending concern about morals in our press and
literature as well as our churches; and few are likely to question
the enormously widespread hypocrisy in practice. No one will
question that a number of brilliant writers are anti-moralists,
while most writers represent moral law as the supreme reality, the
foundation of social life; the starry heavens above our head, as
Kant said, the granite substratum under the soil of our cities, as
Emerson said. And if any do not know the mysticism with which
philosophers veil the moral law, or the ease with which science
explains it, he will soon be informed.

     This extraordinary confusion of thought is not so surprising
as the reader may be inclined to imagine. It will, in fact, be most
useful to understand the confusion itself before we go further.


 
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     Think of the evolution of man's ideas in regard to thunder and
lightning. To the blurred mind of primitive man, as in the blurred
mind of a dog, these are simple facts. They occur. When man began
to see that events have causes, and to believe that the causes in
nature were spirits, he very promptly made a god of thunder and
lightning. And it was a very great god: the sky-god, mountain-god,
thunder-god of nature-religions.

     When the higher religions made God spiritual, they still
maintained that thunder was his voice, in a special way, and
lightning his weapon. Even the simple explanation given by Franklin
did not destroy the belief. In the law of civilized nations today
it is an "act of God" when lightning shatters a building; even if
it kills innocent children.

     Moral law was another kind of thunder, and, being "spiritual,"
it remained a sort of supernatural phenomenon even when man became
fully civilized. Until modern times it was quite unintelligible.
There was the law, no one knew why, no one knew whence. It was
written in every man's conscience, A strange thing, this, and
philosophers set to work on it.

     Philosophers never believe in revelation, and they do not love
science. They were quite pleased when science began to explain the
order of the heavens, the beauty of the rose or of the sunset, and
the adaptations of organs. But science must not touch " spiritual"
things, they said. That was their business. So the confusion goes
on; and the way in which theology is still allowed to dominate our
education, our law-courts, our press, and a large part of our
lives, maintains the confusion in the general mind.

     You will see this clearly if I very briefly sketch the history
of speculation on the nature of morality.

     We have so little literature of the older civilizations that
we cannot say much about the ideas of their thinkers, as far as
they have had any thinkers, but we have found a little Egyptian
moral treatise ("The Maxims of Ptah-Hotep"), of more than four
thousand years ago, which seems to show that even then educated men
who were not priests understood that moral law was simply a human
and social law of conduct. That was the conviction of the two great
moralists, Buddha and Confucius.

     However, real speculation began with the Greeks. Most of the
people who talk about "brilliant Greece" and "meteoric Athens" know
very little about the subject. Earnest thinking about nature and
man began amongst the Greeks, not of Athens or the homeland, but of
Asia Minor.

     We understand this today. The refugees of the splendid old
civilization of Crete, which was destroyed by the early barbaric
Greeks about 1450 B.C., went in part to Palestine, where they
helped to civilize the Hebrews (who came later), and in large part
to Asia Minor, where they civilized the Greek immigrants. As these
Greeks of Asia Minor were independent of the religious bigotry of 




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the homeland, they speculated with great freedom and wonderful
success. They were really scientists, not philosophers. They
guessed the vastness of the universe, believed in atoms and 
evolution, and made very little pretense of believing in gods.

     As the history of thought is usually written, it is said that,
fortunately, these "mere Materialists" were soon thrust aside, and
the great thinkers of Athens turned away from nature and studied
man.

     In point of fact, it was a great misfortune; for it meant the
strangling of science in its cradle. Moreover, these Greek thinkers
of the homeland, while they rejected current religion, as all
philosophers do, were much influenced by fear of the pious
democracy; and the philosophical ideas which they gave the world
instead of theology are now quite discredited.

     First of them was the mystic Pythagoras. He is said to have
been influenced by Buddhism. We can only say that it is a great
pity that he did not introduce into Europe the Agnostic and purely
humanitarian ethic of Buddha. Instead of that he discovered -- I am
quoting a high authority on him -- that "the essence of justice is
a square number." Nice motto to put up in church or a law-court! Or
is that why we speak of a "square deal"?

     Socrates next searched the matter, and we are told that be did
not form any "theory of morals." He merely cleared up men's ideas
as to what is just, and insisted that the moral sentiment depended
upon knowledge.

     Plato, who was the first sociologist as well as a great
philosopher, lost his balance between his two interests. It is
clear that, as a student of social life, he saw that moral law is
"utilitarian," as we now say. It is social law, enforced for the
good of society. But Plato also had a theory that a merely material
world can produce nothing, and all truth, goodness, and beauty must
come from a spiritual world or, as he said, a world of "ideas": not
ideas in the mind of man, but self-existing realities. The "good"
was one of these ideas, and conscience was its voice and
interpreter.

     Aristotle, the most learned and logical of the Greek thinkers,
did not believe in Plato's ideas. No one does today. But, although
Aristotle wrote the first treatise on Ethics (the science of
morality) he did not succeed in understanding the nature of moral
law, and he has left us no theory of it.

     By this time all Greece was speculating -- and there has never
been any country like it for speculation -- on moral law, and there
were three main opinions. There was the Platonic theory; and
Christian writers followed it later, saying that the "ideas" were
in the mind of God. Then there was the theory of the Stoics and
some others. Although the Stoics talked politely about the gods, it
is fairly clear that they did not believe in them. For them moral
law was just "the Law of Nature." It existed. It was part of the
scheme of things. A man was at discord with nature if he did not
observe it.


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     The third theory was really our modern theory, or the correct
theory. Probably the great early scientist and evolutionist
Democritus first discovered the truth. At all events, there were
soon several schools in Greece maintaining that the object and
origin of moral law was simply concern for human welfare. Some,
whom we call Hedonists, said that the test of a moral act was
whether it promoted happiness (the Greek of which is hedone). Some
made happiness consist mainly in pleasure. Others, like Epicurus,
the last and sanest of the Greeks, though his views are nearly
always misrepresented and slandered, said that moral acts were
those which promoted a passionless tranquillity of life. Epicurus
built on science, not philosophy, and tried to bring the world back
to science.

     But Greece fell, and the whole tradition of independent
thinking perished. The Romans were poor thinkers, and most of them,
being Agnostics, followed the Stoics or the Epicureans. Their
humanitarian ideas did magnificent work for the world.

     During the next thirteen or fourteen centuries moral law was
simply held to be a divine command. When at last independent
thinking began again, when the great Deistic movement attacked
revelation, all the old ideas were revived. Some followed the Stoic
theory, that moral law is the Law of Nature. Some connected it with
the divine will, as revealed, not in a Bible but in man's
conscience. But some (Hobbes and Locke) more or less brought out
its human significance: and already some (like Mandevilley
satirized it as a superstition.

     At the end of the eighteenth century German philosophers
began, and from that day to this some weird theories of morality
have been formulated. A vast library of the subject exists, and
there is neither space nor reason even to mention all the theories
here.

     There are two main views. One is the old idea that moral law
is a sort of eternal and august reality, either in "nature" or in
God or in a mystic world which nobody can understand. It is
"intued" (seen directly) by the mind, and so these theories are
known as Intuitionalism. Against this a number of British thinkers
(Hume, Bentham, Spencer, Mill, etc.) held that moral law is a human
law regulating the welfare or "utility" of social life. These are
called Utilitarians; and we shall now see how science stepped in
amongst the philosophers, scattering them right and left, and
proving that the Utilitarians were right.

                      EVOLUTION AND MORALS

     The reader who is inclined to smile at the philosophers, or to
wonder how the deepest thinkers of the race could wander so far
astray, must face the problem as it confronted them.

     Unquestionably there was in the mind of practically all men an
imperious sense of moral law. Men might defy it, but they did not
deny it. And it did not come from revelation, since it was just as
strong among civilized people beyond the range of Christianity, or
before the Christian Era. It was a great reality, and it had to be 
explained.

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     But until the idea of evolution arose again, there was no
possibility of explaining it, at least fully. Some of the Greeks
and the Deists could see how closely this law was related to the
social interests of man. Justice, truthfulness, and self-control
are obviously desirable social qualities. But there were parts of
the law, like sexual purity, that seemed to have no social
significance; and it was not at all clear how even the law of
justice, however useful it was, came into existence. So the law was
taken as a great fact, existing in the scheme of things apart from
man, and "intued" by him through a special faculty which he called
his "conscience."

     The entire situation was changed when the truth of evolution
was proved. Some writers are fond of saying that evolution
describes processes, but does not explain anything. You have here
a good illustration of the foolishness of that gibe at science.

     Evolution said that the human race had been evolving, from the
savage to the civilized level, during at least some hundreds of
thousands of years. This meant two things, as far as the great
problem of the origin of moral law was concerned. It meant, first,
that the law may have arisen amongst, or had been formulated by,
human beings themselves long before the historic civilizations
arose. This would explain how the ancient civilizations simply
found themselves in possession of the moral code, and could
therefore not suppose that it was drawn up by men. If they
themselves had not formulated it, who had?

     We quite understand their difficulty. But the difficulty would
have disappeared ages ago if the theory of evolution sketched by
the first Greek scientists, had been retained and developed. Then
the Greeks might have learned how all their religious and moral and
political ideas had been gradually forged in the workshop of
experience, by a long line of developing ancestors. Evolution lit
up the whole problem, and nearly every other problem.

     Secondly, evolution said that the lower races of men in the
world today represent the various phases of evolution through which
the race has passed. Take a simple illustration from the roses on
a bush. The rose in full bloom or decay certainly passed through
the stages of bud and half-opened flower which you see on the bush.
So the race passed at one time through the successive stages
represented by the Veddah, the Australian, the Bantu, the
Polynesian, and so on. Circumstances drove one branch of the race
onward and kept other branches behind, at various stages of
development.

     If this is true, we ought to find every stage in the evolution
of moral ideas and conscience in the innumerable "savage" tribes
scattered over the earth.

     Here again, you see, the philosophers were at a great
disadvantage. They had not the slightest reason to suppose that
savages could throw any light on the difficult problem they were
examining. Not even the wisest of them could be expected to look in
that direction. In fact, very little was known about savage tribes,
still less about their ideas. Books were in circulation among the 


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learned Greeks describing how the entrance to the lower regions was
about the Rhine valley of today, and how dog-headed men and all
sorts of monstrosities lived where we now find tribes whose ideas
are of the greatest value to us.

     So we do not smile at the older philosophers and their
"theories of morality." We may be pardoned, however, for smiling at
some of their modern successors, who repeat the old mysticism as if
science had not altered the whole situation.

     Take Professor Eucken, of Jena University, whose works on
morality and religion have a large circulation in England and
America. Professor Osborn in one of his works mentions Eucken as
one of the German scientists who have returned to a religious view
of life! Eucken knows nothing whatever about science. He is a
professor of philosophy. He is one of the most popular writers of
the advanced or Modernist religious school.

     Now, Eucken's teachings about morality -- I translated two of
his books, and so I am familiar with his views -- show very clearly
why many philosophers and their religious readers cling to the old
mystic theory, and reject the evolutionary theory, of morality.

     Let us first glance at two earlier thinkers, both so famous as
moralists that we can hardly omit them from a chapter on morality.
One was the eighteenth-century German philosopher Kant. He was
tremendously impressed with the imperiousness of conscience. It
does not, he says, tell you to do this or avoid that if certain,
consequences follow your act. It dictates absolutely or
"categorically." He therefore invented the famous phrase, "the
categorical imperative." God must be behind it, Kant said. And the
answer is that there are no "ifs" about the moral impulse simply
because men had, largely under the influence of religion, actually
forgotten that it was their own race which laid down the law, and
why it laid down the law! It had become a peremptory command,
enforced by education.

     The second moralist is Emerson who, though he does not see a
personal God behind the moral law -- these "inner senses" never
tell two men the same thing -- thinks it quite as categorical as
Kant did. It is an eternal and commanding law, and so on. That is
the chief weakness of Emerson's fine writings. Carlyle has the same
weakness. There is no such categorical and eternal law. There are
simply rules of conduct, obviously of a social significance, which
society impresses upon every child, man, and woman; and there is a
good deal of uncertainty about them.

     Rudolph Eucken makes the same mistake. He starts, he says,
from "the facts of the moral life." You soon see that he means only
the facts of his own very strict moral life and delicate
conscience. Of the phenomena of moral consciousness in the race at
large he knows nothing. Of the revolt of sincere modern thinkers
against moral codes he can give no sensible explanation. He lives
in a hot-house, and then thinks he can tell us the normal
temperature in which the rest of us live. And this applies to the
Felix Adlers and other ethical philosophers who tell America what 



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to think about moral law. I ought to add that the English
philosopher, Professor Carveth Read, has written a much more 
sensible book ("Natural and Social Morals") on the lines of
Evolution.

     Evolution has made all this mysticism superfluous; and it is
the only explanation of moral law in which you can put any
confidence, because it is the only theory which takes into account
all the facts of moral life.

     Since the days of John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer our
knowledge of savage ideas has grown enormously. In such a work as
Professor E.A. Westermarck's "Origin and Development of the Moral
Ideas" (2 vols.), which is the greatest recent scientific study of
ethics, you have the moral ideas and practices of all the backward
fragments of the human race.

     All the fine theories of philosophers break down before this
vast collection of facts. There is no intuition whatever of an
august and eternal law; and the less God is brought into connection
with these pitiful blunders and often monstrous perversions of the
moral sense the better. What we see is just man's mind in
possession of the idea that his conduct must be regulated by law,
and clumsily working out the correct application of that idea as
his intelligence grows and his social life becomes more complex. It
is not a question of the mind of the savage imperfectly seeing the
law. It is a plain case of the ideas of the savage reflecting and
changing with his environment and the interests of his priests.

     The philosophers do not even explain, or candidly confront,
all the facts of the moral life of civilized people. One of the
most striking features of normal moral ideas is that the approval
or censure of an act is overwhelmingly proportionate to the social
value or social injury of the act. Wherever religion or
superstition has perverted the conscience, you may get very
extraordinary notions of sin: amongst the different castes of
Hindus, for instance, and amongst savages. You get mortally serious
rules about washing, sneezing, coughing, excreting, wearing hats,
and so on. But in proportion as men rise toward a rational order --
an order prescribed by rational consideration only, not by blind
subservience to tradition -- the ideas of the moral and immoral
come to coincide more and more with human and social interests.

     Why is justice the fundamental and essential moral law? It is
a vital regulation of social life. Why is murder the greatest
crime? It is the gravest social delinquency. And so on. It would be
a remarkable coincidence if this mystic law of the philosophers and
the theologians, existing before man existed, and surviving when he
disappears, just happened to agree so well with the social
interests of the observers of the law themselves!

                       RELIGION AND MORALS

     For a hundred years, ever since men of science began to take
an interest in the curious tales of travelers, it has been disputed
whether such and such tribes have any moral or religious ideas. The
uncertainty was due in part to unskillfulness in the observer. Very


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often he made no allowance for possible influences of missionaries,
who are apt to put their creed in the black man's childish language
and he reproduces bits of it in his legends. Often, again, the
observer of the tribes, especially if he is a missionary, asks the
natives if they are conscious of "sin" and "duty" and "remorse" and
"God"; and, since they have not even words for such things, he
bluntly says that they have no religion and no morals.

     The whole literature upon which we draw for our knowledge of
the religious and moral ideas of lower races is full of these
contradictions. Lord Avebury ("Origin of Civilization" -- one of
the first works on these lines) concluded generally that savages
have "no moral feeling"; and his "savages" were, as usual, a medley
of tribes at all levels of culture. One writer says: "The Reashin
has no moral sense whatever; whereas it is well known that the
Indian's code was high." The Hottentots in particular, and blacks
in general, are said to have "no moral sense"; but a high authority
tells us that "the strictness and celerity of Hottentot justice are
things in which they outshine all Christians," and another says
that "one of the most marked characteristics of black people is
their keen perception of justice."

     One authority says that the Tonga Islanders (a high race) have
"no words essentially expressive of ... vice, injustice, and
cruelty"; and another says that they "firmly believe that the gods
approve of virtue and are displeased with vice." I could extend the
list indefinitely.

     But the man who studies morality in the light of evolution is
not troubled by these verbal contradictions. They are just what he
expects to find. Ask three travelers to a certain region whether
the natives have government, shops, churches or art. One will say
"no," one "yes," and the third "a sort of government," etc. We more
advanced peoples attach meanings to our words which do not apply to
the corresponding culture of the natives. It is entirely in harmony
with evolution. In Australia the highest authorities on the natives
have assured me that they have "no religion and no morals"; and
they have then assured me that the natives have an elaborate belief
in spirits, especially the spirits of certain remote and very
powerful ancestors, and a relatively high code of character.

     It is religion and morals in the making. It is, from first to
last, a massive testimony to evolution. Everything in the world
testifies to it. Everything in the world is illumined by it.

     Hence we cannot expect to put our finger on a point in the
history of the race and say: Here religion begins, there morality
begins. They rise gradually, with a long dawn. Peoples who do not
even believe in spirits -- and there are some -- clearly have no
religion; but at what precise point the belief in the shadow
becomes religion no sensible man will try to say.

     It is the same with morality. The lowest peoples have nothing
corresponding to conscience or a conscious code of conduct, but
they more or less automatically follow a code. At a higher level of
intelligence they are conscious of a code, but it is merely 



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"custom." At a still higher level the spirits of the dead are said
to be just as interested as the living community in the observance
of this code. Religion and morality enter into combination.

     They arose independently, from quite different roots. No
modern authority questions it. And they remained independent for
some time. Of the Bambala of the Congo an authority says: "There is
no belief that the gods of spirits punish wrong-doing." Sir E.F. Im
Thurn, the great authority on the Indians of Guiana, says that they
have an "admirable" code of conduct and an elaborate Animistic
religion, but there is "absolutely no connection" between the two.
An authority says of the Comanche Indians: "No individual action is
considered a crime, but every man acts for himself according to his
own judgment, unless some superior power should exercise authority
over him." Another says of the American Indian generally: "In his
conception of a God the idea of moral good has no part."

     Such quotations will be found by the score in Westermarck's
book, from which (unless a reference is given) I borrow them. But
if we are equipped with the evolutionary theory, we shall look
carefully for the germ of the higher growth even at the lower
level; and we shall always find it. Morality and religion
gradually, and in large part naturally, blend.

     The second element of the evolution of religion, the
deification of the more striking parts of nature, which gave
religion its great gods, was much slower in blending with morality.
These big spirits did wonderful things, and were admired at a
distance. But there was always a tendency in some of them to become
moral deities, because they could do so much harm or withhold so
much good. The moon, a very popular early god or goddess, did no
particular good or harm. But the sun was a terrible tyrant in the
tropics. The sky might cause a drought by refusing rain or might
send thunder and lightning. The water-god might cause floods. The
fire-god burned houses. The wind-god sent destructive hurricanes.
And so on.

     Chiefly, however, it was the deified ancestors, not the
nature-gods, who were concerned with the observance of custom. They
had made the customs. They took an interest in them. And, although
Herbert Spencer and Grant Allen were wrong in thinking that
ancestor-worship was almost the only source of the making of gods,
very many were made that way. Even great gods of the historic
religion, like the Osiris of the Egyptians, are believed to have
been ancestors. The Romans deified their Emperors. The Christians
deified Christ, and the later Buddhists made a god of Buddha.

     Now in the blending of tribes into kingdoms, when it was
necessary for the rival priesthoods to adjust their deities,
ancestor-gods were often fused with old nature-gods. Osiris was
blended with an old sun-god. These wise deified old ancestors were
particularly interested in proper conduct, and Osiris became in
time the judge of the dead. The wicked were seen to flourish in
this life. Very well, said the priests, they will get it in the
next: which happens to be a good deal longer. So we find nature-
gods turning ethical. Even Jupiter and Zeus were guardians of
justice. They were the sky-gods, the dispensers of rain and 
sunshine, the fathers of all men.

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     Yet Zeus-Jupiter-Dyans-Thor (the old sky-god of the Aryans)
was believed to have had not the slightest regard for sex-rules;
and there we come to a new and interesting chapter in the evolution
of morals. Many of the nature-gods had, as I said, a natural
tendency to become ethical. They sent rain or sunshine or
fertility; they caused drought, fires, storms, and floods. One had
to gratify them by observing the rules. And one of the most
important of all, when men learned agriculture, was the goddess (in
a few places god) of fertility. The spirit of mother-earth was even
more important than that of father-sky.

     But, quite naturally, the fertility of the earth became
closely connected with a woman's fertility. At first human beings
copulated like cattle, not even knowing -- the Australians did not
know it -- that the man begot the child. In time love and fertility
became one of the mightiest facts of life in the mind of men. The
most tremendous force, the most beneficent thing, in the world was
the spirit of sex-pleasure. This gave a twist to the primitive
moral rules; and, as the spirit of war just as naturally became
deified at the same time, another grave perversion of the
humanitarian code of conduct, as we understand it, occurred in
moral evolution. These and other eccentricities we will now show to
be a normal part of the evolution of conscience.

                      MORAL ECCENTRICITIES

     Preachers still shudderingly refer to one of the
"abominations" of ancient Babylon. They tell how the women had to
go to the temple and have commerce with a man before they could
marry; how little crowds of the less pretty women might be seen at
the door soliciting the interest of casual sailors and other men of
little taste and much feeling. As Frazer strangely repeats this in
his "Golden Bough," there is some excuse for the preacher. But we
now know that it is an entire falsification of life in the city of
Babylon. There were, however, temples (and probably an old one in
Babylonia) where this was done, and where there were sacred
prostitutes.

     From the last part of the last section the reader will now
begin to have an idea of the meaning of this strange perversion of
religion and ethics. These were relics of the middle stage of man's
religious evolution. The spirit of generation, in man and in
nature, was just as likely to be deified as the sun and moon. The
act of generation then became in a sense a religious act. The god
or goddess was interested in its happening, not in its prohibition.

     Moreover, it was socially a very desirable thing. The army
wanted men: the men wanted wives and slaves. Disease and war
wrought terrible havoc, and population was urgently needed. The
development of polygamy, which is not a primitive institution, was
scarcely enough. Concubines were allowed. It suited the masculine
nature.

     On the other hand, it came to be believed that human
copulation could influence the fertility of the earth, by a sort of
sympathetic magic. When scientific men find drawings of deer in a
prehistoric cavern, they tell the whole world: it was magic. The
artist believed he could bring the animals nearer and have a 

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profitable hunt. When the same scientific men find a drawing of a
male organ, or a woman with an exaggerated pubic part carved out of
a bit of mammoth's tusk, they say: "How naughty," and shut it away.
Why not the same magic?

     At all events it is certain -- the belief and practices based
upon it lingered in Europe in the Middle Ages -- that men came to
believe that by human generation they prompted the fertility of
mother earth. This easily led to what we call license or
promiscuity. The great nature-festivals were marked by orgies of
sex-pleasure; especially as there was prodigious eating and
drinking. Priests of the goddess discovered, to their advantage,
that it was particularly fortunate for women to have commerce with
them. Priestesses were not likely to avoid the act of which their
goddess was the presiding genius. Large carvings of the sex-organs
stood unblushingly in the temples: until Englishmen and Americans
came along in the nineteenth century.

     Just as natural and intelligible that is to say, from the
evolutionary point of view, and no other -- is another very large
category of perversions of conscience which, perhaps, are the
greatest causes of people's contempt of their lowly relatives. In
science "savage" means a being at a low stage of intellect and
culture. To the general public it means a blood-thirsty, cruel
scalp-seeking or head-hunting monster.

     Savagery in this sense is not a primitive quality of man.
Those lowest fragments of the human race to which I have often
referred are not at all "savage." The Tasmanians, it is true, were
so wicked as to fight for their land when Europeans wanted it. The
Maoris, Red Indians, and others were equally wicked. But at the
most primitive level man is peaceful and honest.

     At that level man is neither a hunter (except in a very small
way) nor an agriculturist. He has no "tribes." The development of
hunting gave man a taste for blood, and the crystallizing of human
groups into distinct tribes, with rival hunting grounds, gave men
a great taste for each other's blood. The peaceful Yahgan type was
succeeded by the less peaceful (but not bad) Australian type, and
this by the fierce South American Indian, the Dyak head-hunter, the
Fiji cannibal, the terrible Zulu, and so on.

     Under this heading I must not quote. The list would be
endless. But you see the principle. Tribal organization and hunting
involve conflicts about encroachments on each other's grounds or
areas. Conflicts lead to wars. "Savagery" becomes a social quality.
The tribe, in self-defense, wants fierce and ruthless warriors.
Spies and prisoners must be tortured and killed. The world begins
to run with blood. And since conscience is the interpreter of
custom, of the interests of the tribe, it sanctions everything.

     The growth of society while man is still so imperfect helps
this. Men accumulate "property," and other men steal it. A prettily
carved stick or a deadly spear tempts a neighbor. With the growth
of Animism, these things are believed to have "medicine" or "manu"
or some supernatural force. A man can't make that. He steals it.
And, as justice is still slow and imperfect, the victim retaliates.


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Murder is more common, and murder leads to blood-feuds, all over
the earth. Revenge becomes a terrible and legitimate passion (as
there is no electric chair).

     Here religion or superstition enters, and makes things worse.
One great root of these moral eccentricities is that the spirit of
the murdered man has to be appeased. It may, otherwise, make itself
very unpleasant. The murderer must die, if he can be found; if not,
somebody belonging to him must die. In fact, the Loucheux Indians
used to lacerate themselves after a funeral, to appease the spirit
of the dead man. Some of the California Indians would kill the
murderer's best friend, not the murderer, on the idea that it
inflicted more pain. The Maoris, Aetas, and others would, after a
murder, go out and kill the first man they met. Others would kill
the first animal they met. Thousands of such aberrations of
conscience are easily understood.

     But graver evil is done, and worse eccentricities arise, by
the transfer of the care of law from living society to the spirits.
I do not envy the man who some day will try to answer the question:
Has religion done more good or harm to the race? Believe me, it
will require a ledger as large as the "Encyclopedia Britannica."
Let me give here one illustration out of hundreds.

     The spirits or gods, who are gradually credited with concern
for conduct, are the counterparts of living men. Heaven is always
a feeble reflection of earth: of the hunting grounds of the Indian,
the harem of the Asiatic, or the dull intellectual world of the
Christian philosopher. In the early stages the active spirits or
demigods are even worse than men. They are generally devils. At the
best, they follow the character of living humanity. Man smites the
offender or, if he cannot find him, smites his wife, children, and
relatives. Then be smites the family and relatives as well as the
man. He visits the sins of the father on the children and on all
his kin.

     He comes to believe that this is just; and the priests approve
it everywhere. In early Chinese law all male relatives of an
offender were responsible. The Catholic Inquisition wrought
terrible harm to the families of heretics: and for sordid reasons.
Mexican law enslaved the children of a traitor to the fourth
generation. Athenian law -- law generally, in fact -- banished the
family with the father. Plato and Confucius were the first to
condemn this principle.

     It was a ghastly stage in the evolution of thought when this
was transferred to the gods. Very early it led to human sacrifices.
"Off with his head" was the refrain constantly on the lips of
kings; and the spiritual kings were believed to be just as
bloodthirsty. Somebody had to die to appease them. The larger the
number of victims, the more the gods would smile. Thousands of
victims in a day were sometimes ripped open in Mexico. In ancient
Europe and nearly all over the earth the gods' altars stank with
human blood.





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     The advance of humanity -- the reform never came from the
priests -- led to some curious modifications of this. In Peru, 
where the priests wanted the blood of children for the sacrament,
they were in the end only permitted to punch the children's noses.
In ancient Rome dolls were strung on little trees at mid-winter
instead of the old human sacrifices. In China paper images of men
were burned. Generally, animals were substituted for men; but there
was a peculiar development in the "scapegoat."

     Sin began to be treated as a sort of unpleasant commodity that
you could unload on some other person; just as an Arab will bend
down when you are cursing him and let the curse fly over his head.
That was in part the meaning of the human sacrifice. And as the
gods wanted something good, not any shabby old thing, kings and
kings' sons and daughters had to die. This, in conjunction with
another idea which we see elsewhere, led to "sons of God" taking
the sins of the world upon themselves.

     But every variety of scapegoat is known. The Hebrews
("Leviticus, XVI") had the childish idea that they could unload the
sins of the people upon a goat, which was driven into the
wilderness. The "inspiration" was quite common. The Maoris
transferred their annual accumulation of sins to a fern, which
floated on the river out to sea. The Badagas of India prefer a
calf, which is driven into the jungle (and is probably happy ever
afterwards). The Egyptians chose a bull. The Iroquois Indians
transferred all the sins of the tribe once a year to a white dog,
which they (more prudently) burned. The Peruvians washed their sins
off in the river, as the Hindus do in the Ganges today, and the
spiritual animalcule were supposed to float out to sea.

     Much less amusing was the development in the direction with
which we are more familiar. Where there was only a very dim idea
about the future life, the prosperity of the wicked was always a
terrible problem. Why Shamash, or Jupiter, or Zeus, or Jahveh,
permitted so much injustice, no one could say; for the Babylonians,
Romans, Greeks, and Hebrews had no definite ideas of the life
beyond the grave. Other peoples had no problem. They invented hell.
Their gods would pass the record of the most ferocious torturing
kings that had ever been. They would keep their victims alive for
all eternity and torture them all the time.

     I am not concerned here with the agony that this awful belief
has caused, or with the religious persecutions, witch-burnings, and
Inquisitions it inspired. I am noting it as one of the most awful
aberrations of man's moral instinct under the influence of
religion. It so got into the blood of men that people who
considered themselves highly intellectual and refined in modern
times could see no harm in it. Gladstone and Roosevelt believed in
hell! (I tried hard to think of two other eminent men not
politicians or theologians, but could not.)

     And another aberration of the moral sense under the influence
of superstition was cannibalism. No doubt it was sometimes due to
primitive lack of humanity. sometimes to economic pressure (as the
killing of the aged often is), but it was very largely
"sacramental." You got the strength or virtue of the eaten man. 


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This led, in mystic ways, to the rather common religious practice
of eating the god, or communion; though there is another root to
this, as we shall see. Head-hunting was another perversion inspired
by religious beliefs.

     Probably the largest and most eccentric moral aberrations were
due to religion in precisely the field where it claims its highest
service.

     One great human tendency which we have seen made for sex
license. There were others, however, which made for the restriction
of sex. The menstrual trouble of women was one. They were
periodically "unclean." In childbirth, the superior male thought,
they were again unclean. All sorts of tabus grew up, and the sex
act began, over large areas, to be regarded with suspicion. Priests
and priestesses were forbidden it. Sacred seasons were not to be
contaminated with it. Men and women began to believe that one
became wonderfully wise and enlightened if one avoided copulation;
and others became wonderfully holy. Out of it all arose, also, the
contempt of woman, of which Egypt and Babylon knew nothing.

                       THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC

     It is difficult to see how any man or woman, knowing even the
few facts which it is possible to give here, can doubt the modern
theory of moral evolution. We are not taking a few bones of
prehistoric man and guessing how he lived. It is there, all over
the earth, today. Religion and morals, and the combination of the
two or ethical religion, are actually in the human workshop, being
made. We more advanced workers have finished the job and are
watching the apprentices.

     Yes, you may say (with a sigh), it was a natural evolution:
unguided, wasteful, replete with the folly of childhood, dark with
the awful impulses of the real savage. But the time came.
Revelation of a holier law broke gradually upon this world. God
made himself known to one or two peoples -- why to one or two, or
so late, we don't know -- and bade them purify the conscience of
the world. Stumbling man was taken by the hand and led -- at last.

     This is as false as the idea that God created man and watched
over him. Nothing new or original appeared in Judea. Monotheism was
already known. An ethic higher than that of the Hebrew prophets
already existed.

     Even while I am writing this, in the heart of London, the
papers tell that an English clergyman is in terrible difficulties
with his flock, because he declines to read certain Psalms in
church. You can guess which Psalms -- those about dashing the heads
of little children on the stones, and so on; and these Psalms were
written quite late in the history of Judea! And the English
congregation rises in wrath, and says that these things shall be
regarded as the Word of God! Nothing miraculous or new or puzzling
happened when Christ appeared. The stream of natural moral
evolution just flowed on.




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     I do not say "stood still," remember. It was flowing all the
time. In the year 1 A.D. it ought to be much further than in the
year 1000 B.C. There would be no great miracle if the world were
more enlightened in 500 A.D. than in 500 B.C. It was a thousand
years older, and three great civilizations had meantime added to
man's heritage. (As a matter of fact, the world was not more
enlightened in 500 A.D. than in 500 B.C.)

     The only point here is to complete my story by inquiring if
the new religion fits naturally into it. And instead of making a
number of general statements for which the evidence cannot appear
here, let us take two or three of what are commonly said to be the
greatest moral innovations of Christ and Christianity.

     The first is, of course, the Golden Rule. Let us take it
humanly. Nobody is ever going to love his neighbor as be loves
himself. It can't be done. The human emotions are not made that
way. An ideal ought to be something that can be realized. But we
need not worry about this. You are, of course, aware that the
Golden Rule of life in this sense -- "Thou shalt love thy neighbor
as thyself" -- is a quotation from the Old Testament. It is not a
Christian contribution to the pretty sentiments of moralists. It
was centuries old when Christ quoted it.

     And as the Old Testament, as we have it, was written only late
in the fifth century B.C., its doctrine of brotherly love is more
than a century later than that of Buddha. Moreover, Buddha meant
universal love. Every man was not the Jew's brother, or his
neighbor. I presume you know enough about the ancient Jews to know
that. The Jews never even professed to love anybody but Jews; and
they hated quite a lot of those. A quarrel between Jews is
something to see. But Buddha, as any work on him will tell you,
demanded that every man should love his fellows as a mother --
these were his words -- loves her children.

     Let us take the Golden Rule in its proper and more or less
practical form: Act toward others as you would have them act toward
you. It is a most admirable principle. It puts the Utilitarian
theory of morality in a nutshell. It is so obvious a rule of social
life that one is not surprised that few ever said it. It is not
profound. It is common sense. If you do not want lies told you,
don't tell them. If you want just, honorable, kindly, brotherly
treatment from Cyrus P. Shorthouse or James F. Longshanks, try to
get it by reciprocity.

     Rather a good word, is it not, reciprocity? Well, the famous
and Agnostic Chinese moralist Confucius gave that as the Golden
Rule six hundred years before Christ was born, and nearly two
hundred years before the Old Testament, as we have it, was written!

     You may shake your head, and say that you have heard that
Rationalist story before. Confucius, you may say, only taught the
Golden Rule in a negative form: Do not unto others what you do not
want them to do to you. That statement is found in the whole of
Christian literature. Christ went much farther than Confucius.




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     Well, presuming that you do not read Chinese, and that the
translation of the Chinese classics is not available, open that 
most accessible of books, the "Encyclopedia Britannica" at the
article "Confucius." It is written by a Christian missionary and
fine Chinese scholar, Dr. Legge, and it has been available to every
Christian writer for years. Dr. Legge says, quoting the expression
Golden Rule: "Several times he [Confucius] gave that rule in
express words: What you do not like when done to yourself, do not
do to others."

     At last a disciple asked him if he could put it in a word. He
gave the composite Chinese word "reciprocity." Dr. Legge tells us
that it consists of the two characters "as heart": let the impulses
of your heart be the same as those you want in your neighbor's. And
lest you should still insist that perhaps it was only negative, Dr.
Legge goes on: "It has been said [it is said by nearly every other
Christian writer] that he only gave the rule in a negative form,
but be understood it in its positive and most comprehensive form."
No Chinese scholar differs from that; and Professor Westermarck
gives other sayings of Confucius to prove it.

     Yet, but, you say, there is the counsel to love even one's
enemies. Did any moralist in the world ever urge such a refinement
of virtue before Christ?

     Alas, yes, (Pardon the sigh, but I never love my enemies. I
think it would be bad social policy to do so. It rather encourages
the mean and unjust.) The Old Testament says: "Thou shalt not hate
thy brother." Perhaps that is not conclusive, but it does not
matter, as the counsel had been given quite explicitly long before.

     The great Chinese sage, Lao-tse, a contemporary of Confucius
and nearly as Rationalistic as Confucius, said: "Recompense injury
with kindness." That is near enough; and the doctrine seems to have
been common in the humanitarian ethic of China. Later, in the
fourth century B.C., we find the chief disciple of Confucius, The
great moralist Mencius, who seems to have been the first in the
world to condemn war, saying: "A benevolent man does not lay up
anger, nor cherish resentment against his brother, but only regards
him with affection and love."

     There in the heart of Agnostic China, three hundred years
before the Sermon on the Mount was delivered, you have the complete
doctrine of loving your enemies as a commonplace of humanitarian
morality.

     Buddha in India taught the same doctrine. Love was to be
universal, he insisted; and in the Dhammapada we read: "Hatred
ceases by love: this is an old rule." It seems, in fact, to have
been as common in India centuries before Christ as it was in China.
In the "laws of Manu," compiled early in the Christian Era, but
consisting of ancient Hindu writings, it is said: "Against an angry
man let him not in return show anger: let him bless when he is
cursed."





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     Non-Christian European moralists -- Socrates and Plato,
Seneca, Pliny, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius -- all had the same 
sentiment. "We ought not to retaliate, or render evil for evil to
anyone," said Socrates, quoted approvingly by Plato. Seneca wrote
a whole treatise on "Anger," condemning it in every form. It is
therefore not in the least surprising that, when Greek influence
began to be felt in Judea, as we see in Ecclesiastics and Proverbs,
the same sentiment is reproduced. "Thou shalt not hate thy
brother," was already written in Leviticus; but, as I said before,
the Jew's "brother" always meant a Jew. The sentiment, however, was
now so common in every school of moralists that the finer Hebrews
naturally adopted it, and, through the school of the Rabbi Hillel,
it passed on to the Christians.

     Here, then, is a sentiment, which thousands of Christian
writers have claimed to be entirely original in Christ, actually
found to be a commonplace of moralists for hundreds of years before
Christ and in the "pagan" world. I trust the Christian reader will
see in this a striking illustration of the way in which he is
misled; but I will carry the argument just one step further.

     It occurred to no Christian, not even to Christ, that, if this
moral sentiment is lofty, it ought pre-eminently to apply to man's
conception of God. On what principle must Christ as man love his
enemies, and Christ as God devise for them an eternity of fiendish
torment? And, since God, the ideal, was held to punish
transgressors of his law, human and ecclesiastical society
everywhere continued without scruple to do so.

     We realize today that this is immoral. We inflict penalties to
deter would-be transgressors, not as punishment. Who introduced
this idea into the world? Plato and Aristotle. They taught the
Greeks that the "punishment" of a criminal was "a moral medicine"
and a deterrent. Then came Christianity, and the sentiment was
lost. Punishment, as such, was more abominable than ever. At last
a group of humanitarians won the reform. Who were they? Grotius (a
liberal Christian or semi-Rationalist, and the least effective),
and then Hobbes, Montesquieu, Beccaria, Filangiere, Feuerbach,
Schopenhauer, and (above all) Bentham -- all Rationalists, most of
them Agnostics.




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               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY
                               by
                          Joseph McCabe

                              1929


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